“Last September, at one of those periodic events where Apple offers up a new product with much fanfare, Steve Jobs invited the audience to join him in admiring the latest iteration of the iPod Nano. With the touch-screen interface associated with the iPhone and the iPad, the music player had shrunk to a square, weighing less than an ounce and almost comically wee,” Rob Walker reports for The New York Times. “Some observers took it for a joke when Jobs said an Apple board member intended to sport the thing as a watch. Others didn’t laugh; they sprang into action.”

“The Nano-watch fad merges two well-established developments of the gizmo era. The first is that Apple’s various handheld devices have spawned ecosystems of spinoff and add-on products and accessories, from function-adding attachments to style-focused cases and covers,” Walker reports. “The second is that no matter how many devices we carry around that happen to have clocks built into them, the idea of the wristwatch soldiers on.”

Walker reports, “The case is best made by Minimal, a design firm based in Chicago… [which] offers two wrist-wearable bands. With the TikTok (preselling for $35 in January), you snap your Nano into a reinforced plastic case attached to a ‘high-grade silicone rubber’ strap. (You can pop it out via an empty space on the back that happens to be the right size to reveal the Apple logo, and is referred to in the promo video as the ‘brand hole.’) The LunaTik has a two-piece, bolt-together compartment fashioned from ‘aerospace-grade aluminum’ and is meant for someone less concerned with removing the Nano for nonwatch uses; it’s preselling for $70.”

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6 Comments

Several years ago Bill Gates theorized a “Dick Tracey” watch, after a comic strip cop with a super functional watch. I say super, but the things it fictionally did were barely rudimentary by iPhone/iPod standards. The closest microsoft got was the big ass table and a BSOD with a wrist strap.